A new featurette for Alien: Romulus has emerged, while some journalists have received an unexpected VHS tape through the post…
Acid-tinged horror sequel Alien: Romulus is a shade over a month away, and 20th Century Studios is stepping up its marketing campaign as a result.
Yesterday (the 12th July) saw a salvo of material emerge, including a featurette (more on that in a moment) and mysterious VHS tape, sent out to a handful of journalists including Gizmodo’s Germain Lussier.
Housed in a cardboard sleeve like the cheap kung fu movies this writer used to buy for a couple of pounds in the early 90s, the tape’s a clever means of highlighting director Fede Alvarez’s old-school approach to making his Alien sequel.
The marketing team behind it also went to the effort of putting some stuff on the tape, including a three-minute scene from the movie and a trailer revealing that Alien: Romulus will be making some form of appearance at Comic-Con in San Diego.
Here’s the tape first of all. That’s a pretty cool cover, isn’t it?
The back of the box, interestingly, contains a slightly different synopsis from the one previously put out by Fox. It goes like this:
A truly terrifying cinematic experience from producer Ridley Scott and director/writer Fede Alvarez, 20th Century Studios’ Alien Romulus opens in theaters nationwide August 16, 2024. The sci-fi horror thriller takes the phenomenally successful Alien franchise back to its roots. While scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station, a group of young space colonizers come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe.
The new featurette, meanwhile, offers a mix of clips from the film, behind the scenes footage and brief interviews with Alvarez and his cast, including Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson. We’ll go through some of its scenes in more detail in a separate post.
Then there’s that scene from the promo VHS, which Lussier and io9 kindly videoed and shared on YouTube. It doesn’t give too much away (which is a good thing) but provides an insight into the six young characters as they make their way to the Renaissance space station where the film’s horrors take place.
You can read Germain Lussier’s account of receiving his unexpected VHS tape – and the process of trying to find a working video recorder to watch it on – over on Gizmodo/io9.
Alien: Romulus is out in cinemas on the 16th August 2024.
